I regard myself as an
advocate of animal rights  as a part of the animal rights
movement. That movement, as I conceive it, is committed to a
number of goals, including:

the total abolition of
the use of animals in science;

the total dissolution of
commercial animal agriculture;

the total elimination
of commercial and sport hunting and trapping.

There are, I know, people
who profess to believe in animal rights but do not avow these
goals. Factory farming, they say, is wrong - it violates animals'
rights - but traditional animal agriculture is all right. Toxicity
tests of cosmetics on animals violates their rights, but important
medical research  cancer research, for example  does not. The
clubbing of baby seals is abhorrent, but not the harvesting of
adult seals. I used to think I understood this reasoning. Not any
more. You don't change unjust institutions by tidying them up.

What's wrong 
fundamentally wrong  with the way animals are treated isn't the
details that vary from case to case. It's the whole system. The
forlornness of the veal calf is pathetic, heart wrenching; the
pulsing pain of the chimp with electrodes planted deep in her
brain is repulsive; the slow, tortuous death of the racoon caught
in the leg-hold trap is agonizing. But what is wrong isn't the
pain, isn't the suffering, isn't the deprivation. These compound
what's wrong. Sometimes - often - they make it much, much worse.
But they are not the fundamental wrong.

The fundamental wrong is
the system that allows us to view animals as our resources,
here for us  to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or
exploited for sport or money. Once we accept this view of animals
- as our resources - the rest is as predictable as it is
regrettable. Why worry about their loneliness, their pain, their
death? Since animals exist for us, to benefit us in one way or
another, what harms them really doesn't matter  or matters only
if it starts to bother us, makes us feel a trifle uneasy when we
eat our veal escalope, for example. So, yes, let us get veal
calves out of solitary confinement, give them more space, a little
straw, a few companions. But let us keep our veal escalope.

But a little straw, more
space and a few companions won't eliminate - won't even touch -
the basic wrong that attaches to our viewing and treating these
animals as our resources. A veal calf killed to be eaten after
living in close confinement is viewed and treated in this way: but
so, too, is another who is raised (as they say) 'more humanely'.
To right the wrong of our treatment of farm animals requires more
than making rearing methods 'more humane'; it requires the total
dissolution of commercial animal agriculture.

How we do this, whether we
do it or, as in the case of animals in science, whether and how we
abolish their use - these are to a large extent political
questions. People must change their beliefs before they change
their habits. Enough people, especially those elected to public
office, must believe in change - must want it - before we will
have laws that protect the rights of animals. This process of
change is very complicated, very demanding, very exhausting,
calling for the efforts of many hands in education, publicity,
political organization and activity, down to the licking of
envelopes and stamps. As a trained and practising philosopher, the
sort of contribution I can make is limited but, I like to think,
important. The currency of philosophy is ideas - their meaning and
rational foundation - not the nuts and bolts of the legislative
process, say, or the mechanics of community organization. That's
what I have been exploring over the past ten years or so in my
essays and talks and, most recently, in my book, The Case for
Animal
Rights. I
believe the major conclusions I reach in the book are true because
they are supported by the weight of the best arguments. I believe
the idea of animal rights has reason, not just emotion, on its
side.

In the space I have at my
disposal here I can only sketch, in the barest outline, some of
the main features of the book. It's main themes - and we should
not be surprised by this - involve asking and answering deep,
foundational moral questions about what morality is, how it should
be understood and what is the best moral theory, all considered. I
hope I can convey something of the shape I think this theory
takes. The attempt to do this will be (to use a word a friendly
critic once used to describe my work) cerebral, perhaps too
cerebral. But this is misleading. My feelings about how animals
are sometimes treated run just as deep and just as strong as those
of my more volatile compatriots. Philosophers do  to use the
jargon of the day  have a right side to their brains. If it's the
left side we contribute (or mainly should), that's because what
talents we have reside there.

How to proceed? We begin
by asking how the moral status of animals has been understood by
thinkers who deny that animals have rights. Then we test the
mettle of their ideas by seeing how well they stand up under the
heat of fair criticism. If we start our thinking in this way, we
soon find that some people believe that we have no duties directly
to animals, that we owe nothing to them, that we can do nothing
that wrongs them. Rather, we can do wrong acts that involve
animals, and so we have duties regarding them, though none to
them. Such views may be called indirect duty views. By way of
illustration: suppose your neighbour kicks your dog. Then your
neighbour has done something wrong. But not to your dog. The wrong
that has been done is a wrong to you. After all, it is wrong to
upset people, and your neighbour's kicking your dog upsets you. So
you are the one who is wronged, not your dog. Or again: by kicking
your dog your neighbour damages your property. And since it is
wrong to damage another person's property, your neighbour has done
something wrong - to you, of course, not to your dog. Your
neighbour no more wrongs your dog than your car would be wronged
if the windshield were smashed. Your neighbour's duties involving
your dog are indirect duties to you. More generally, all of our
duties regarding animals are indirect duties to one another  to
humanity.

How could someone try to
justify such a view? Someone might say that your dog doesn't feel
anything and so isn't hurt by your neighbour's kick, doesn't care
about the pain since none is felt, is as unaware of anything as is
your windshield. Someone might say this, but no rational person
will, since, among other considerations, such a view will commit
anyone who holds it to the position that no human being feels pain
either - that human beings also don't care about what happens to
them. A second possibility is that though both humans and your dog
are hurt when kicked, it is only human pain that matters. But,
again, no rational person can believe this. Pain is pain wherever
it occurs. If your neighbour's causing you pain is wrong because
of the pain that is caused, we cannot rationally ignore or dismiss
the moral relevance of the pain that your dog feels.

Philosophers who hold
indirect duty views  and many still do  have come to understand
that they must avoid the two defects just noted: that is, both the
view that animals don't feel anything as well as the idea that
only human pain can be morally relevant. Among such thinkers the
sort of view now favoured is one or other form of what is called
contractarianism.

Here, very crudely, is the
root idea: morality consists of a set of rules that individuals
voluntarily agree to abide by, as we do when we sign a contract
(hence the name contractarianism). Those who understand and accept
the terms of the contract are covered directly; they have rights
created and recognized by, and protected in, the contract. And
these contractors can also have protection spelled out for others
who, though they lack the ability to understand morality and so
cannot sign the contract themselves, are loved or cherished by
those who can. Thus young children, for example, are unable to
sign contracts and lack rights. But they are protected by the
contract none the less because of the sentimental interests of
others, most notably their parents. So we have, then, duties
involving these children, duties regarding them, but no duties to
them. Our duties in their case are indirect duties to other human
beings, usually their parents.

As for animals, since they
cannot understand contracts, they obviously cannot sign; and since
they cannot sign, they have no rights. Like children, however,
some animals are the objects of the sentimental interest of
others. You, for example, love your dog or cat. So those animals
that enough people care about (companion animals, whales, baby
seals, the American bald eagle), though they lack rights
themselves, will be protected because of the sentimental interests
of people. I have, then, according to contractarianism, no duty
directly to your dog or any other animal, not even the duty not to
cause them pain or suffering; my duty not to hurt them is a duty I
have to those people who care about what happens to them. As for
other animals, where no or little sentimental interest is present
- in the case of farm animals, for example, or laboratory rats -
what duties we have grow weaker and weaker, perhaps to vanishing
point. The pain and death they endure, though real, are not wrong
if no one cares about them.

When it comes to the moral
status of animals' contractarianism could be a hard view to refute
if it were an adequate theoretical approach to the moral status of
human beings. It is not adequate in this latter respect, however,
which makes the question of its adequacy in the former case,
regarding animals, utterly moot. For consider: morality, according
to the (crude) contractarian position before us, consists of rules
that people agree to abide by. What people? Well, enough to make a
difference - enough, that is, collectively to have the
power to enforce the rules that are drawn up in the contract. That
is very well and good for the signatories but not so good for
anyone who is not asked to sign. And there is nothing in
contractarianism of the sort we are discussing that guarantees or
requires that everyone will have a chance to participate equally
in framing the rules of morality. The result is that this approach
to ethics could sanction the most blatant forms of social,
economic, moral and political injustice, ranging from a repressive
caste system to systematic racial or sexual discrimination. Might,
according to this theory, does make right. Let those who are the
victims of injustice suffer as they will. It matters not so long
as no one else  no contractor, or too few of them  cares about
it. Such a theory takes one's moral breath away ... as if, for
example, there would be nothing wrong with apartheid in South
Africa if few white South Africans were upset by it. A theory with
so little to recommend it at the level of the ethics of our
treatment of our fellow humans cannot have anything more to
recommend it when it comes to the ethics of how we treat our
fellow animals.

The version of
contractarianism just examined is, as I have noted, a crude
variety, and in fairness to those of a contractarian persuasion it
must be noted that much more refined, subtle and ingenious
varieties are possible. For example, John Rawls, in his A
Theory of Justice, sets forth a version of contractarianism
that forces contractors to ignore the accidental features of being
a human being - for example, whether one is white or black, male
or female, a genius or of modest intellect. Only by ignoring such
features, Rawls believes, can we ensure that the principles of
justice that contractors would agree upon are not based on bias or
prejudice. Despite the improvement a view such as Rawls's
represents over the cruder forms of contractarianism, it remains
deficient: it systematically denies that we have direct duties to
those human beings who do not have a sense of justice - young
children, for instance, and many mentally retarded humans. And yet
it seems reasonably certain that, were we to torture a young child
or a retarded elder, we would be doing something that wronged him
or her, not something that would be wrong if (and only if) other
humans with a sense ofjustice were upset. And since this is true
in the case of these humans, we cannot rationally deny the same in
the case of animals.

Indirect duty views, then,
including the best among them, fail to command our rational
assent. Whatever ethical theory we should accept rationally,
therefore, it must at least recognize that we have some duties
directly to animals, just as we have some duties directly to each
other. The next two theories I'll sketch attempt to meet this
requirement.

The first I call the
cruelty-kindness view. Simply stated, this says that we have a
direct duty to be kind to animals and a direct duty not to be
cruel to them. Despite the familiar, reassuring ring of these
ideas, I do not believe that this view offers an adequate theory.
To make this clearer, consider kindness. A kind person acts from a
certain kind of motive - compassion or concern, for example. And
that is a virtue. But there is no guarantee that a kind act is a
right act. If I am a generous racist, for example, I will be
inclined to act kindly towards members of my own race, favouring
their interests above those of others. My kindness would be real
and, so far as it goes, good. But I trust it is too obvious to
require argument that my kind acts may not be above moral reproach
- may, in fact, be positively wrong because rooted in injustice.
So kindness, notwithstanding its status as a virtue to be
encouraged, simply will not carry the weight of a theory of right
action.

Cruelty fares no better.
People or their acts are cruel if they display either a lack of
sympathy for or, worse, the presence of enjoyment in another's
suffering. Cruelty in all its guises is a bad thing, a tragic
human failing. But just as a person's being motivated by kindness
does not guarantee that he or she does what is right, so the
absence of cruelty does not ensure that he or she avoids doing
what is wrong. Many people who perform abortions, for example, are
not cruel, sadistic people. But that fact alone does not settle
the terribly difficult question of the morality of abortion. The
case is no different when we examine the ethics of our treatment
of animals. So, yes, let us be for kindness and against cruelty.
But let us not suppose that being for the one and against the
other answers questions about moral right and wrong.

Some people think that the
theory we are looking for is utilitarianism. A utilitarian accepts
two moral principles. The first is that of equality: everyone's
interests count, and similar interests must be counted as having
similar weight or importance. White or black, American or Iranian,
human or animal - everyone's pain or frustration matter, and
matter just as much as the equivalent pain or frustration of
anyone else. The second principle a utilitarian accepts is that of
utility: do the act that will bring about the best balance between
satisfaction and frustration for everyone affected by the outcome.

As a utilitarian, then,
here is how I am to approach the task of deciding what I morally
ought to do: I must ask who will be affected if I choose to do one
thing rather than another, how much each individual will be
affected, and where the best results are most likely to lie -
which option, in other words, is most likely to bring about the
best results, the best balance between satisfaction and
frustration. That option, whatever it may be, is the one I ought
to choose. That is where my moral duty lies.

The great appeal of
utilitarianism rests with its uncompromising egalitarianism:
everyone's interests count and count as much as the like
interests of everyone else. The kind of odious discrimination that
some forms of contractarianism can justify - discrimination based
on race or sex, for example - seems disallowed in principle by
utilitarianism, as is speciesism, systematic discrimination based
on species membership.

The equality we find in
utilitarianism, however, is not the sort an advocate of animal or
human rights should have in mind. Utilitarianism has no room for
the equal moral rights of different individuals because it has no
room for their equal inherent value or worth. What has value for
the utilitarian is the satisfaction of an individual's interests,
not the individual whose interests they are. A universe in which
you satisfy your desire for water, food and warmth is, other
things being equal, better than a universe in which these desires
are frustrated. And the same is true in the case of an animal with
similar desires. But neither you nor the animal have any value in
your own right. Only your feelings do.

Here is an analogy to help
make the philosophical point clearer: a cup contains different
liquids, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes a mix of the
two. What has value are the liquids: the sweeter the better, the
bitterer the worse. The cup, the container, has no value. It is
what goes into it, not what they go into, that has value. For the
utilitarian you and I are like the cup; we have no value as
individuals and thus no equal value. What has value is what goes
into us, what we serve as receptacles for; our feelings of
satisfaction have positive value, our feelings of frustration
negative value.

Serious problems arise for
utilitarianism when we remind ourselves that it enjoins us to
bring about the best consequences. What does this mean? It doesn't
mean the best consequences for me alone, or for my family or
friends, or any other person taken individually. No, what we must
do is, roughly, as follows: we must add up (somehow!) the separate
satisfactions and frustrations of everyone likely to be affected
by our choice, the satisfactions in one column, the frustrations
in the other. We must total each column for each of the options
before us. That is what it means to say the theory is aggregative.
And then we must choose that option which is most likely to bring
about the best balance of totalled satisfactions over totalled
frustrations. Whatever act would lead to this outcome is the one
we ought morally to perform  it is where our moral duty lies. And
that act quite clearly might not be the same one that would bring
about the best results for me personally, or for my family or
friends, or for a lab animal. The best aggregated consequences for
everyone concerned are not necessarily the best for each
individual.

That utilitarianism is an
aggregative theory  different individuals' satisfactions or
frustrations are added, or summed, or totalled - is the key
objection to this theory. My Aunt Bea is old, inactive, a cranky,
sour person, though not physically ill. She prefers to go on
living. She is also rather rich. I could make a fortune if I could
get my hands on her money, money she intends to give me in any
event, after she dies, but which she refuses to give me now. In
order to avoid a huge tax bite, I plan to donate a handsome sum of
my profits to a local children's hospital. Many, many children
will benefit from my generosity, and much joy will be brought to
their parents, relatives and friends. If I don't get the money
rather soon, all these ambitions will come to naught. The
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a real killing will be
gone. Why, then, not kill my Aunt Bea? Oh, of course I might
get caught. But I'm no fool and, besides, her doctor can be
counted on to co-operate (he has an eye for the same investment
and I happen to know a good deal about his shady past). The deed
can be done . . . professionally, shall we say. There is very
little chance of getting caught. And as for my conscience
being guilt-ridden, I am a resourceful sort of fellow and will
take more than sufficient comfort - as I lie on the beach at
Acapulco - in contemplating the joy and health I have brought to
so many others. Suppose Aunt Bea is killed and the rest of the
story comes out as told. Would I have done anything wrong?
Anything immoral? One would have thought that I had. Not according
to utilitarianism. Since what I have done has brought about the
best balance between totalled satisfaction and frustration for all
those affected by the outcome, my action is not wrong. Indeed, in
killing Aunt Bea the physician and I did what duty required.

This same kind of argument
can be repeated in all sorts of cases, illustrating, time after
time, how the utilitarian's position leads to results that
impartial people find morally callous. It is wrong to kill
my Aunt Bea in the name of bringing about the best results for
others. A good end does not justify an evil means. Any adequate
moral theory will have to explain why this is so. Utilitarianism
fails in this respect and so cannot be the theory we seek.

What to do? Where to begin
anew? The place to begin, I think, is with the utilitarian's view
of the value of the individual  or, rather, lack of value. In its
place, suppose we consider that you and I, for example, do have
value as individuals  what we'll call inherent value. To
say we have such value is to say that we are something more than,
something different from, mere receptacles. Moreover, to ensure
that we do not pave the way for such injustices as slavery or
sexual discrimination, we must believe that all who have inherent
value have it equally, regardless of their sex, race, religion,
birthplace and so on. Similarly to be discarded as irrelevant are
one's talents or skills, intelligence and wealth, personality or
pathology, whether one is loved and admired or despised and
loathed. The genius and the retarded child, the prince and the
pauper, the brain surgeon and the fruit vendor, Mother Teresa and
the most unscrupulous used-car salesman  all have inherent value,
all possess it equally, and all have an equal right to be treated
with respect, to be treated in ways that do not reduce them to the
status of things, as if they existed as resources for others. My
value as an individual is independent of my usefulness to you.
Yours is not dependent on your usefulness to me. For either of us
to treat the other in ways that fail to show respect for the
other's independent value is to act immorally, to violate the
individual's rights.

Some of the rational
virtues of this view - what I call the rights view - should be
evident. Unlike (crude) contractarianism, for example, the rights
view in principle denies the moral tolerability of any and
all forms of racial, sexual or social discrimination; and unlike
utilitarianism, this view in principle denies that we can
justify good results by using evil means that violate an
individual's rights -denies, for example, that it could be moral
to kill my Aunt Bea to harvest beneficial consequences for others.
That would be to sanction the disrespectful treatment of the
individual in the name of the social good, something the rights
view will not  categorically will not ever allow.

The rights view, I
believe, is rationally the most satisfactory moral theory. It
surpasses all other theories in the degree to which it illuminates
and explains the foundation of our duties to one another - the
domain of human morality. On this score it has the best reasons,
the best arguments, on its side. Of course, if it were possible to
show that only human beings are included within its scope, then a
person like myself, who believes in animal rights, would be
obliged to look elsewhere.

But attempts to limit its
scope to humans only can be shown to be rationally defective.
Animals, it is true, lack many of the abilities humans possess.
They can't read, do higher mathematics, build a bookcase or make
baba ghanoush. Neither can many human beings, however, and
yet we don't (and shouldn't) say that they (these humans)
therefore have less inherent value, less of a right to be treated
with respect, than do others. It is the similarities
between those human beings who most clearly, most
non-controversially have such value (the people reading this, for
example), not our differences, that matter most. And the really
crucial, the basic similarity is simply this: we are each of us
the experiencing subject of a life, a conscious creature having an
individual welfare that has importance to us whatever our
usefulness to others. We want and prefer things, believe and feel
things, recall and expect things. And all these dimensions of our
life, including our pleasure and pain, our enjoyment and
suffering, our satisfaction and frustration, our continued
existence or our untimely death - all make a difference to the
quality of our life as lived, as experienced, by us as
individuals. As the same is true of those animals that concern us
(the ones that are eaten and trapped, for example), they too must
be viewed as the experiencing subjects of a life, with inherent
value of their own.

Some there are who resist
the idea that animals have inherent value. 'Only humans have such
value,' they profess. How might this narrow view be defended?
Shall we say that only humans have the requisite intelligence, or
autonomy, or reason? But there are many, many humans who fail to
meet these standards and yet are reasonably viewed as having value
above and beyond their usefulness to others. Shall we claim that
only humans belong to the right species, the species Homo
sapiens? But this is blatant speciesism. Will it be said,
then, that all - and only - humans have immortal souls? Then our
opponents have their work cut out for them. I am myself not
ill-disposed to the proposition that there are immortal souls.
Personally, I profoundly hope I have one. But I would not want to
rest my position on a controversial ethical issue on the even more
controversial question about who or what has an immortal soul.
That is to dig one's hole deeper, not to climb out. Rationally, it
is better to resolve moral issues without making more
controversial assumptions than are needed. The question of who has
inherent value is such a question, one that is resolved more
rationally without the introduction of the idea of immortal souls
than by its use.

Well, perhaps some will
say that animals have some inherent value, only less than we have.
Once again, however, attempts to defend this view can be shown to
lack rational justification. What could be the basis of our having
more inherent value than animals? Their lack of reason, or
autonomy, or intellect? Only if we are willing to make the same
judgment in the case of humans who are similarly deficient. But it
is not true that such humans  the retarded child, for example, or
the mentally deranged - have less inherent value than you or I.
Neither, then, can we rationally sustain the view that animals
like them in being the experiencing subjects of a life have less
inherent value. All who have inherent value have it
equally, whether they be human animals or not.

Inherent value, then,
belongs equally to those who are the experiencing subjects of a
life/Whether it belongs to others - to rocks and rivers, trees and
glaciers, for example  we do not know and may never know. But
neither do we need to know, if we are to make the case for animal
rights. We do not need to know, for example, how many people are
eligible to vote in the next presidential election before we can
know whether I am. Similarly, we do not need to know how many
individuals have inherent value before we can know that some do.
When it comes to the case for animal rights, then, what we need to
know is whether the animals that, in our culture, are routinely
eaten, hunted and used in our laboratories, for example, are like
us in being subjects of a life. And we do know this. We do know
that many - literally, billions and billions - of these animals
are the subjects of a life in the sense explained and so have
inherent value if we do. And since, in order to arrive at the best
theory of our duties to one another, we must recognize our equal
inherent value as individuals, reason - not sentiment, not emotion
- reason compels us to recognize the equal inherent value of these
animals and, with this, their equal right to be treated with
respect.

That, very roughly,
is the shape and feel of the case for animal rights. Most of the
details of the supporting argument are missing. They are to be
found in the book to which I alluded earlier. Here, the details go
begging, and I must, in closing, limit myself to four final
points.

The first is how the
theory that underlies the case for animal rights shows that the
animal rights movement is a part of, not antagonistic to, the
human rights movement. The theory that rationally grounds the
rights of animals also grounds the rights of humans. Thus those
involved in the animal rights movement are partners in the
struggle to secure respect for human rights - the rights of women,
for example, or minorities, or workers. The animal rights movement
is cut from the same moral cloth as these.

Second, having set out the
broad outlines of the rights view, I can now say why its
implications for farming and science, among other fields, are both
clear and uncompromising. In the case of the use of animals in
science, the rights view is categorically abolitionist. Lab
animals are not our tasters; we are not their kings. Because these
animals are treated routinely, systematically as if their value
were reducible to their usefulness to others, they are routinely,
systematically treated with a lack of respect, and thus are their
rights routinely, systematically violated. This is just as true
when they are used in trivial, duplicative, unnecessary or unwise
research as it is when they are used in studies that hold out real
promise of human benefits. We can't justify harming or killing a
human being (my Aunt Bea, for example) just for these sorts of
reason. Neither can we do so even in the case of so lowly a
creature as a laboratory rat. It is not just refinement or
reduction that is called for, not just larger, cleaner cages, not
just more generous use of anaesthetic or the elimination of
multiple surgery, not just tidying up the system. It is complete
replacement. The best we can do when it comes to using animals in
science is - not to use them. That is where our duty lies,
according to the rights view.

As for commercial animal
agriculture, the rights view takes a similar abolitionist
position. The fundamental moral wrong here is not that animals are
kept in stressful close confinement or in isolation, or that their
pain and suffering, their needs and preferences are ignored or
discounted. All these are wrong, of course, but they are
not the fundamental wrong. They are symptoms and effects of the
deeper, systematic wrong that allows these animals to be viewed
and treated as lacking independent value, as resources for us -
as, indeed, a renewable resource. Giving farm animals more space,
more natural environments, more companions does not right the
fundamental wrong, any more than giving lab animals more
anaesthesia or bigger, cleaner cages would right the fundamental
wrong in their case. Nothing less than the total dissolution of
commercial animal agriculture will do this, just as, for similar
reasons I won't develop at length here, morality requires nothing
less than the total elimination of hunting and trapping for
commercial and sporting ends. The rights view's implications,
then, as I have said, are clear and uncompromising.

My last two points are
about philosophy, my profession. It is, most obviously, no
substitute for political action. The words I have written here and
in other places by themselves don't change a thing. It is what we
do with the thoughts that the words express  our acts, our deeds
- that changes things. All that philosophy can do, and all I have
attempted, is to offer a vision of what our deeds should aim at.
And the why. But not the how.

Finally, I am reminded of
my thoughtful critic, the one I mentioned earlier, who chastised
me for being too cerebral. Well, cerebral I have been: indirect
duty views, utilitarianism, contractarianism - hardly the stuff
deep passions are made of. I am also reminded, however, of the
image another friend once set before me  the image of the
ballerina as expressive of disciplined passion. Long hours of
sweat and toil, of loneliness and practice, of doubt and fatigue:
those are the discipline of her craft. But the passion is there
too, the fierce drive to excel, to speak through her body, to do
it right, to pierce our minds. That is the image of philosophy I
would leave with you, not 'too cerebral' but disciplined
passion. Of the discipline enough has been seen. As for the
passion: there are times, and these not infrequent, when tears
come to my eyes when I see, or read, or hear of the wretched
plight of animals in the hands of humans. Their pain, their
suffering, their loneliness, their innocence, their death. Anger.
Rage. Pity. Sorrow. Disgust. The whole creation groans under the
weight of the evil we humans visit upon these mute, powerless
creatures. It is our hearts, not just our heads, that call
for an end to it all, that demand of us that we overcome, for
them, the habits and forces behind their systematic oppression.
All great movements, it is written, go through three stages:
ridicule, discussion, adoption. It is the realization of this
third stage, adoption, that requires both our passion and our
discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in
our hands. God grant we are equal to the task.